So i finished Fable. Initially I tried my usual approach of doing all the side quests and looking for all the hidden treasures. Eventually these activities became a bit repetitive and I decided to progress in the main quests and get the game over with.
The good:
The World design is good, the town and wilderness areas feel like they have been designed by a human rather than generated as procedural environments. Solid colorful graphics help seal the deal on style.
The dungeon design is interesting, it feels organic, the caves flow naturally and the dungeons are fairly large. This may not be the pinnacle of dungeon design but many games including Fallout 3 and Oblivion have introduced hideously shallow 3 room dungeons into their games that feel repeated over and over.. Fable stands out from the crowd.
Town interaction, you can buy almost any structure talk to any one, get in town jobs, a step in the right direction.
The moral choices in the game feel more significant than most games that offer a good and bad path. Your actions significant change the world around you and the town reactions to you.
The Bad and the Ugly:
Lack of motivation to interact with people. Most NPCs feel like carbon copies with different likes and dislikes. There is a lot of great systems for interacting with people, after a whille you will question why you should interact with them though.
Meele combat system. The fights look good and provide some satisfying moments. However they boild down to simple button mashing in most cases. You only have one button assigned to do all of your meele actions including swinging combos and blocking. It makes the fights a bit dull and repetitive.
Ranged combat system. It seems like the ranged fighting tries to be every thing at once, an isometric shooter and an over the shoulder sniping game with bonuses for charging your shots. The controls for shooting are mapped to the Y button again, a quick press fire your gun, holding the button jumps to aim mode that allows auto targeted shots, adding left trigger lets you aim at body parts. The shot is fired when the Y button is released. This adds up to a really awkward button combo.
Limited exploration. The game world at times appears to be open, but is actually mostly very linear offering a single path to get to most places. There is a few maps that are open but still provide defined entry and exit points.
Economy. It's very easy to get stinking rich in this game. Once you own property you will be making a constant stream of revenue, whether your Xbox is on or not. It's a novel idea, however it breaks the game economy and makes the game a bit too easy.
Weapons. First of all there are some positive points as there are many types of ranged and meele weapons, for the most part the only difference is swing speed vs damage. So you can pick your fighting style this way. However there are 4 tiers of weapons to be bought from shops with the final 5th tier reserved for rare magic weapons. As the game progresses rather quickly you will quickly exhaust any excitement from these shops since you will see everything they have to offer. There are no magical attributes to set the shop weapons apart. You simply get the weapon of choice between level 1 and 4 and you may have the option to pay extra to get a slot or two to add some magical attributes.
Characters and Story. Plain old boring stereotypes. There is very little to this story, simple revenge killing set in an interesting environment. The synopsis should fit on a lunch napkin.
Conclusion:
The first 2 hours of Fable appeared to be a dream, the new Zelda meets Oblivion for the current generation. In the end it failed to deliver everything it wanted but is still a solid game. There is a lot of potential, and I will certainly look at the sequel to the game.
